January 2009, Vol. 40, Issue 1
The Slippery Road From Actions on Objects to Functions and Variables
Tamar Paz; Uri Leron
Functions are all around us, disguised as actions on concrete objects. Our data show that the intuitions about change and invariance entailed by the action-on-objects scheme, although helpful in earlier stages of learning functions, may later come to clash with the formal concepts of function and of composition of functions.
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